Page 73 of The Associate
Gael was watching him. The world narrowed to the sharp line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the dark, intent eyes holding Samuel captive. Samuel’s lips parted on a shaky, silent breath.
The kiss, when it came, did not crash over him. It began as a soft, searching pressure. Gael’s lips were warm, surprisingly soft, moving with a slow curiosity over his own. It was a tasting. An exploration of the shape and give of him.
Samuel melted.
All the tension, the fear, the overwhelming devotion, dissolved into liquid heat. A helpless, broken sound escaped him, a moan that was swallowed by Gael’s mouth. His hands, which had been limp at his sides, flew up of their own volition, clutching fistfuls of the soft black fabric of Gael’s shirt. His fingers twisted thematerial, needing something solid to hold onto as the ground fell away.
As if the moan were a permission, an answer to the question, the kiss changed.
It deepened. The softness vanished, replaced by hunger. Gael’s mouth opened over his, and the wet, hot slide of his tongue swept in, claiming the intimate space. Samuel yielded utterly, opening for him, his own tongue meeting the relentless stroke in a shy, eager mimicry.
The hand in his hair became a vise. It tilted Samuel’s head back, exposing the vulnerable line of his throat, forcing his mouth up at a more ravaging angle.
Gael consumed him.
The kiss grew wet, messy, desperate. Samuel was lost in it, drowning in sensation. Whimpers vibrated in his throat, swallowed by the hungry press of lips and tongue. He arched his back, his bare chest straining, seeking contact, friction, more. He was hard and aching in his trousers, a throbbing, insistent pulse of need that was secondary only to the need for air, for the relentless possession of this kiss to never end. He clutched harder at Gael’s shirt, a silent, frantic plea formore, closer, don’t stop.
Just as suddenly as it had transformed, it stopped.
Gael tore his mouth away, pulling back. But the grip in his hair remained, holding him in place, forcing his head to stay tilted back. He stared up, dazed, his vision swimming, his body screaming at the loss of contact.
Gael’s breath was uneven, his chest rising and falling against Samuel’s clenched fists. His eyes were black, pupils blownwide with a hunger that mirrored Samuel’s own. For a long, suspended moment, they simply existed in the fractured silence.
Then Gael spoke, his voice a ragged, low vibration that seemed to come from deep in his chest. “I’ll drive you home.”
He released Samuel’s hair. The sudden absence of the anchoring pressure made Samuel sway. Gael stood up in one fluid motion, the distance between them now a yawning chasm. He extended a hand.
Sam stared at the offered hand, his mind still white noise, his body thrumming with unmet need and shock. Slowly, he placed his trembling hand in Gael’s and he was pulled to his feet.
He walked on wooden legs to where his shirt and jacket lay discarded on the floor. He bent, his movements clumsy, and picked up the shirt. His hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t align the buttons with the holes. He fumbled, a button slipping again and again from his useless fingers, a wave of frustrated helplessness rising in his throat.
Then Gael was there. He didn’t speak. He pushed Samuel’s trembling hands aside and took the edges of the shirt. His own hands, in stark contrast, were perfectly steady. He began to button the shirt from the bottom up, his movements slow.
Samuel could only stand there, staring at the top of Gael’s bent head, at the movements of his fingers against the white cotton. It was an intimacy more devastating than the kiss; this quiet, wordless care, this re-doing of the thing he had just so thoroughly undone.
When the last button was fastened at his throat, Gael smoothed the fabric over Samuel’s shoulders, his palms resting there for a weighted second. Then he retrieved the jacket and held it open. Samuel turned, sliding his arms into the sleeves, feeling theweight of the wool settle back onto him. Gael’s hands came to his shoulders once more, adjusting the lie of the jacket with a few brief, precise tugs.
He moved then, turning around and leaving the apartment without another word.
Sam followed.
The drive was quiet.
Samuel floated beside Gael, encased in a haze that was part deep calm and part frantic, unmet arousal. The peace of the evening still hummed in his bones. But it was overlaid now with the raw, aching memory of the kiss, the possessive grip in his hair, the sudden, devastating stop.
He felt like a instrument that had been played to a crescendo and then abruptly silenced, its strings still vibrating with a note that had no resolution.
Gael pulled the car to the curb outside Samuel’s building twenty minutes later. The engine cut off. The sudden quiet was immense, a vacuum that pressed in from all sides. The only light was the sickly green glow of the dashboard, painting Gael’s profile in stark, unreadable planes.
The silence stretched. Samuel could hear the faint, rapid beat of his own heart.
Finally, Gael turned his head. In the dim light, his eyes were pits of shadow, his expression carved from stone.
“From now on, I expect you to arrive at my apartment each Friday at 8 pm sharp, and stay until Sunday morning. Is that understood?”
The words did not compute at first. They were sounds. Then they were concepts.Friday. Sunday. Stay. They assembled into a structure of time and demand that was so vast, so all-consuming, that Samuel’s mind simply whited out. A blank, static screen.
He can’t. He shouldn’t. That’s… that’s a weekend. That’s… living there. It’s wrong. It’s insane. It’s...
